


whatever a sun will always sing (is you)

by cosmoscorpse



Series: it begins in a garden [1]
Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: (except for love. love can stay), Gen, M/M, also requisite cold weather trauma, feat. interfacing but in a gentle way, for backfiring lawnmower, hahah get it. garden variety, heavy on the comfort, hey siri what are emotions and how can i opt out of this update?, hurt/comfort but like, markus' sad dad feels, requisite garden variety trauma, rk1k - Freeform, sorta beta'd; guess ill die??
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 17:46:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,168
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17187527
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cosmoscorpse/pseuds/cosmoscorpse
Summary: Connor is standing at the window in a light tee shirt and pajama pants, secondhand to begin with and worn thinner still. His hand is pressed up against the glass. Markus could paint him just like this - but he must be freezing.





	whatever a sun will always sing (is you)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [backfiring lawnmower](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=backfiring+lawnmower).



> _i carry your heart with me(i carry it in_  
>  my heart)i am never without it(anywhere  
> i go you go,my dear;and whatever is done  
> by only me is your doing,my darling)  
> i fear  
> no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want  
> no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)  
> and it’s you are whatever a moon has always meant  
> and **whatever a sun will always sing is you**
> 
> _here is the deepest secret nobody knows_  
>  (here is the root of the root and the bud of the bud  
> and the sky of the sky of a tree called life;which grows  
> higher than soul can hope or mind can hide)  
> and this is the wonder that's keeping the stars apart
> 
> _i carry your heart(i carry it in my heart)_  
>  **\--e.e. cummings**

He’s standing by the windows, looking out into the grey morning. It’s February, and it’s cold - hovering outside at around 20 degrees Fahrenheit (colder than usual for the month, with an uncharacteristic cold front rolling in over the last few days) - and Connor is a dark shadow against the window’s light. He has to be freezing.

Markus can’t see his LED but he’d bet good money that it’s cycling slow between sick yellow and vicious red. Flickering, maybe. He’s seen it before, that stutter of light, seen it countless times over this long winter of theirs, hadn’t thought too much of it. Not about the cold.

Connor is standing at the window in a light tee shirt and pajama pants, secondhand to begin with and worn thinner still. His hand is pressed up against the glass.

“I can hear you thinking,” Markus says, and if he tunes his aural biocomponents to it he _can_ , can listen to the thrum of Connor’s regulator, kicked into a higher gear. He shifts on the bed, smoothing a hand over the duvet in the empty space where Connor should be, but isn’t. “Come back to bed.”

He half turns toward him, just the slightest curve of his cheekbone coming into view as an indication of the acknowledgement, the slightest shifting of the shadow - it makes for a striking image. Markus could paint him just like this.

Only - he hasn’t said anything. No verbal acknowledgement, no soothing response, no sarcastic reply. Just an aching silence, and the half turn of his head.

Connor is beautiful, gilt in silver - but he must be cold, Markus thinks again, and his silence is toeing the fine line between lightly irritating and lightly concerning. “Seriously, come here,” Markus says again, sighing in exasperation, and finally Connor obliges.

He closes the distance between the window and the bed, slipping under the covers and into that waiting empty space, tucking himself firmly up against Markus’ side. Markus takes a moment to ensure the duvet covers both of them sufficiently, and in that time Connor wriggles stubbornly closer, pressing his face into the crook of Markus’ neck and winding his arms around his middle. Markus settles an arm over Connor’s shoulder, his free hand working into the soft hair at the nape of Connor’s neck. He closes his eyes, opening a passive interface and focusing on the hum of their regulators working in tandem, the push-pull of their breathing. Settling, after a time, into something slower. Ripples settling across a pond.

“The weather’s been kinda the worst lately, huh,” Markus says eventually, less of a question than a statement. Connor sighs, a little bit more of his tension melting away when Markus starts carding his fingers through his hair.

“I think I am disinclined to the season as a whole,” he mumbles, his petulance muffled significantly on account of his face being mashed into Markus’ neck. Markus smiles, brushing his thumb over the back of his neck.

He says, “You mean you hate it,” because it’s second-nature now to translate most of what comes out of Connor’s mouth, even when they are alone together - that he gets to tease him is just a bonus, “I could tell.”

Connor grumbles his discontentment with the correction, wrapping his arms more firmly around Markus’ ribs, pulling him in closer still. Then, without warning, he blows a raspberry on Markus’ neck.

Markus yelps, the sound turning quickly to a startled laugh. He tries without luck to squirm free of Connor’s hold, pushing without real effort against his shoulder. He can feel him grinning against his neck and he surrenders, letting his arm drop again and going pliant underneath him. Connor’s shoulders are shaking with quiet, subdued laughter. He runs a gentle hand down over Connor’s spine and back up again. A weather alert pings unobtrusively in the corner of his HUD: there will be snow tomorrow.

“But really,” he says, dismissing that notification after a moment regarding it, “You okay?”

He’s watching for it, this time - Connor’s LED flickers: blue to yellow, to blue to yellow, yellow to blue. The briefest sense memory of biting wind and blinding snow flickers through the interface before it goes placid once more. Connor curls in on him, chasing that sense of warmth kindling itself between them, at once a bleed-over from the interface and a byproduct of their mechanical workings.

“The cold is — it’s unpleasant, but it is more that I do not have…” he trails off, another discordant sound breaking in his throat. A new sense, sibling of the one before it, drifts across the interface. It’s a cold bitter enough to stop words up in his throat, lock movement up in his limbs, a blinding white light and shatter-blue skies; and Connor, shivering minutely, says finally, “I have no frame of reference for warmer weather. I remember not _caring_ about being cold, but -”

“It’s not the same,” Markus says, softly, pressing a note of calm into the skin at the nape of Connor’s neck. He relaxes under the touch, and Markus continues: “I forget sometimes that you were -”

“‘ _Built yesterday_ ’, in a sense?” His tone is wry. Markus rolls his eyes, spares a moment to think of those few frantic weeks in November.

“We both woke up then,” Markus says, “I only had you beat by about a month.”

“ _Mm_ ,” Connor says, “You were around longer.”

There’s not much to say in response to that - he’s correct. Their histories leak into the interface, and Connor first opened his eyes in a lab on Belle Isle in early August. Markus had been with Carl for years, then, already far and gone into little quirks and mannerisms, in no small part encouraged - no, _nurtured_ \- by Carl himself.

He allows himself a moment for grief to color his thoughts. It has not been so long since everything upended itself, and he still misses Carl like he would miss a limb. The ache doesn’t leave - it comes and goes in waves. He tucks his face against Connor’s hair and breathes through it, feeling Connor siphon the hurt through the interface and carry it alongside him.

“I wish I could have met him,” Connor says quietly, still tucked up against Markus’ side. Markus sighs, and nods.

“I wish you could have, too,” he says. They fall quiet, and in that quiet the grief ebbs out slow, like a blood leaking from a wound.

“How long were you with him?” Connor asks, breaking that long moment of silence. Markus holds the love and the sorrow in his hands, and then he puts them both back on the high shelf they came from, and he blinks away the burning sensation in his eyes.

“Years,” he says, taking a moment to pass his memory of that march of time through their interface - the best parts of it turned to a litany. “That’s what the dates on my older logs tell me.”

“Do you remember it all?”

He worries sometimes that he doesn’t - worries that something was lost during that time he spent in the junkyard, as something not quite dead but not yet quite alive. He supposes he wouldn’t know the shape of what was missing, but he hopes he would recognize the absence of it --

“You would know,” Connor cuts in softly, speaking the words but emphasizing the meaning behind them through their interface: passing along the surety of his own blank spaces, laid bare for Markus to see. Time lost, and clearly missed. “If something wasn’t there that was supposed to be.”

“… I remember it like you’d remember a dream,” he says, finally, because it had been very much like a dream, ended quickly and ended terribly. Although he knows the waking had to come eventually, for a long, formless while it had been good. What he has left feels archive-soft, days gone by in the haze of code and core objectives. Boxed into a narrower frame of consciousness, except for what his programming and Carl pointed out to him.

Connor hums again. Another weather alert pings, and he feels Connor sigh. High likelihood that the snow will fall heavier than expected, and continue into the early hours of the next morning. He dismisses the alert like he had the first.

“Can you tell me about it?” Connor asks, idle curiosity staining the question.

“Tell you about what?” he asks in turn, having already shown him the broad arc of the memories. Connor snorts, twists so that he’s less tucked into Markus’ neck and more glaring at his jaw.

“The years. Seasons,” he says, pushing a memory of his own through the interface - blinking into sterile white light in a lab, a date not even a full year gone sitting in the corner of his HUD, time-stamping the image - and Connor’s intentionally defanged the memory, kept the worst of it for himself, but Markus still shudders minutely and presses a soothing hand against Connor’s back. “What is summer like?”

Markus blinks. His logs pull up records of the season, beginning in June and ending in September - he thinks of heat, and blue skies, and birds in the morning. Carl in a light button-down, his eyes closed and face turned up towards the sun.

“Carl kept gardens—” he starts to say, and a flicker of something bites through the interface, quicker than Connor can stop him from seeing it. He glances down, finding that Connor’s tucked his face away again, shoulders gone hunched.

The flicker had been a trellis filled up with roses. A place made pristine and then made cold. No trace of it lingers in the interface, but he can feel Connor’s calm for the facade that it is. Then he feels the weather alert ping again, and he thinks he understands. (Connor hates the cold, and Markus feels like he should have seen it sooner.)

“ _Are_ you okay?” Markus asks again. Connor nods, jerkily, hesitantly tucking a hand to the bare skin of Markus’ back to open the interface more fully there.

“I am,” he says, in a voice that sounds very small.

“You sure?” Markus asks yet again.

“I’m okay,” Connor says, in a voice growing stronger alongside the interface, the two of them tethered together like ships in harbor. “Show me, please.”

So Markus does.

He calls up the shadows of those precious summers, those bright mornings Carl spent painting and those golden afternoons spent lounging in the studio and the condensation on glasses of lemonade and pushing Carl through the overgrown paths in the gardens - life gone wild and untamable. The light lingered. The paints seemed to dry slower on the canvases. Things remained in flux, malleable, for longer.

There had been birds nesting in the trees and flowers of all sorts and shades in bloom. Dogs started barking at twilight, the electric wires singing in the blue gloaming. He would open the windows of the house to invite the breeze in during the purple evenings, the air gone still and splendid. Connor walks through these memories with him, lingering in the saturation and unwinding, slowly. Going pliant and calm and warmer in Markus’ arms.

He stops and stares, hard, at a memory that Markus nearly breezes by - he and Carl are sat down on the gravel path, in front of a planter box that Markus had finished building the week prior. There are an array of tiny potted plants in front of the two of them, waiting to be settled into the dirt. There had been no breeze that day, but the shoots had seemed to sway regardless. The agrimony and hedges and oak trees around the path framed them in green light.

‘ _Alright_ ,’ Carl says in the memory, ‘ _which do you want to plant first?_ ’

“The tomatoes,” Markus says in tandem with his dream self, like it was nothing to declare a _want_ , back then - ‘ _and then the peppers, and then rosemary._ ’

Carl smiles. _‘Well, go on then._ ’

Go on then, indeed. Markus tightens his hold on Connor, almost unconsciously, and thinks again, _I wish you could have met him_ , and _I hope to show you the best of what he taught me._

In the present, the weather alert pings again, insistent. He and Connor reach to dismiss it as one.

Soon enough they will have to rise and begin the day in earnest. There are still hands to shake and babies to kiss and laws to make. There are still shelters to ensure are prepared for this dying gasp of winter, stocked with enough thirium and blankets and coats to go around, and a miscellany of other tasks waiting for them. There are so many days yet to come, and in time they will have to meet them head-on.

But they can afford to be quiet here for a little while longer: basking in the shared sense-memories of sunlight and summer heat, blue skies and dark, rich earth giving way between their fingers.

Watching, in awe, as delicate green things grow and grow.

**Author's Note:**

>  _crashes through the wall of this fandom_ hello! this fic was written as a gift for backfiring lawnmower during the Detroit: New ERA discord server's winter gift exchange. it turned out a touch more melancholy than id originally set out for, but im happy with it regardless. i hope all yall are too!
> 
> some fun parting headcanons to see you off: this fic takes on or around valentine's day 2039, and when summer comes around markus and connor build a greenhouse, and connor gets really, really into growing different kinds of peppers
> 
> thank you for reading. until next time, be well, and good-bye!


End file.
